We used Coulouris in our Distributed Systems course back in 2010, it covers all the fundamentals used in today's modern systems. Things like ring quorums are i

We used Coulouris in our Distributed Systems course back in 2010, it covers all the fundamentals used in today's modern systems. Things like ring quorums are implemented by Cassandra and other systems, I just didn't know about them (ie Cassandra et al...) to put a face to the name back then. One thing to do is to start reading papers, and branch out from there. There's a few major ones like the Map-Reduce Paper, BigTable, Dremel, Raft, perhaps Paxos etc... and use the citations to then deepen your understanding. Also there's plenty of people here who can always answer questions. :) Cheers.